#vislor turlough whump

[whumpingwho]

turlough getting bullied by the black guardian

bonus comfort for the hurt - the doctor and tegan being good friends:

[cringecompanionapologist]

Top 5 Worst Days for Turlough

Okay maybe I'm as bored as I implied in the last post but this isn't a top five you're gonna find anywhere else.

Basically, here are five stories where very bad things happen to Turlough from least bad to most bad. Obviously, these are my perceptions and other people might not be put this in the same order. Also, I haven't seen everything, so I might miss something big and just not know.

Also, this turned out really fucking long because I just had to rant about number 1.

Number 5: Loups-Garoux (Big Finish Audio from 2001, written by Marc Platt)

I'm only putting this one at the bottom because Loups-Garoux is mostly a comedic story and Turlough seems to recover fine. He sees a vision of his dark side so terrifying he jumps out of a moving train and gets eaten by a werewolf, who spits him out because he has silver on him. Unlike in many of these examples, the Doctor seems a bit upset about this. But, this almost feels like business as usual.

Number 4: Trap for Fools (Big Finish Short Trip from 2018, written by Stephen Fewell)

Okay, this one might be a bit of a me thing. I can get a bit overly sensitive about the subject of mean teachers. In order to find and defeat the Monster of the Week, the Doctor has Turlough go undercover as a student at Space Brendon, basically. The Doctor seems completely oblivious to Turlough's misery and doesn't do much to help him through reliving experiences he was willing to kill to escape. This is another one that's mostly played for laughs, with most of the Horrors Turlough faces being mild bullying and a teacher pronouncing his name wrong on purpose to be a dick, but Turlough is actually intimidated by the mean teacher and mentally categorizes the other students by how much of a threat they might be and is just generally miserable the entire time.

Really, there's one bit that made me decide that this belonged on the list because it's really sad:

Someone please hug him.

Number 3: The Velvet Dark (Short Trip: Farewells from 2006, written by Stewart Sheargold)

The Master shoots Turlough with the TCE, making the Doctor think he'd just casually murdered him, only to reveal that he shrunk Turlough without killing him to make him a more manageable hostage. The Master places him in a box and shakes the box around when the Doctor hesitates in cooperating with him.

This story starts with the Master faking his death and the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough attending his funeral. Tegan doesn't get why the Doctor is sad that the guy who killed her aunt is dead now. Turlough also doesn't get it, but he doesn't have as much of a personal reason to hate the Master, so he tries to be patient and Tegan seems kind of jealous that the Doctor listens to him more than her.

After being returned to his proper size, Turlough hates the Master just as much as Tegan does. The Doctor, apparently unable to truly hate the Master, kind of treats them both like the bad guys in this.

Number 2: Frontios (TV Serial from 1984, written by Christopher H. Bidmead)

An actual TV story! Tractators. Trion, at some point in the planet's history, was attacked by this story's Monster of the Week and now all Trions, regardless of when they were born, remember the Tractators on some level. It's never explained how this actually works, but Turlough personally had probably never heard of the Tractators until he saw a tunnel and a massacre just showed up in his brain. The Doctor awkwardly hands him off to the one-shots to go explore the tunnels, not knowing what to do about all this emotional stuff.

You'll notice that the Doctor's response to whatever happens to Turlough is a major factor in how I rank these.

Anyway...

Number 1: The King of Terror (Past Doctor Adventure novel from 2000, written by Keith Topping)

It isn't even close. The novels of the Wilderness Years (1990-2004) were aimed at an adult audience and there were very few limits on what sort of situations the Doctor and his companions could end up in. So, sometimes, shit got dark. I usually tend to find these morbidly funny, because saying things like "The Doctor and Dodo meet the Marquis de Sade" and "Doctor Who's Cannibal Holocaust" is fun. It just is. Shut up.

These books vary in quality. Some actually do interesting things with their darker subject matter while others are just sort of edgy for the sake of it. The King of Terror is in the latter category and is annoying as hell about it. I could go into way more detail about every stupid thing that happens in this book, but the Turlough stuff is the most interesting stupid thing, because of how fucked up it is.

So, Turlough, feeling a bit OOC on a trip to Los Angeles in 1999, goes to a bar, gets completely wasted, and chats up local girls trying to get laid. Then one woman stands out as hypnotically sexy, introduces herself as Eva, and invites Turlough back to her place to have sex. Turlough is too drunk to notice that this is moving a bit fast.

Anyway, Eva is actually a member of an alien species called the Jex who are trying to take over the world. They want to terraform Earth to be more like their homeworld, which has a hotter, thicker atmosphere, but their human slaves wouldn't be able to do hard labor in those conditions, so they want to genetically modify the humans to have higher heat resistance, among other things. There's something wrong with Jex DNA, so they need the DNA of some other alien with higher heat resistance.

The CIA, wanting to see where this is all going, tipped the Jex off that some aliens had just showed up in LA and Eva went out to kidnap one. Turlough then spends like half the book being experimented on to both confirm that he's an alien and that he's the right type of alien.

It's a lot of torture. I'm not even going to say any of what happens. Here's one screenshot of Turlough reflecting on all the torture happening to him that is vague but sums up why I'm not going to elaborate:

(Note: There actually is a reference to something specific in here and I apologize in advance)

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Tegan find out that Turlough's missing. Tegan seems to think that they should do something about this, while the Doctor comments jokingly on how often Turlough gets captured. He eventually gives Tegan the day off to take her mind of things, leading to a really stupid romance subplot, while he does absolutely nothing to find Turlough.

Turlough eventually very brutally murders Eva in an understandable lapse of sanity and escapes. The Doctor isn't even there when he gets back and they reunite "offscreen". From that point on, the whole subplot is basically dropped. The Doctor asks Turlough if he's okay, he lies and says he is, the Doctor knows it's a lie, but he's glad for a chance to act like it never happened.

So, it really sucks to be Turlough and I'm now exhausted.

[whumpingwho]

'Doctor, help me! Doctor!'

[whumpingwho]

'Captain Wrack has strange ideas concerning entertainment...'

[whumpingwho]

Tegan and Turlough looking after the Doctor in the Five Doctors